Do you know who Bongzilla's tech is? The guy that taught me everything I know has definitely worked on their gear: Joe Frantzen. He part-time tech's at Greg's Guitar Shop for fun really. He's the brains behind my new behemoth Bass Amp as well. Smartest and most thorough guy I know, hands down. Decades of experience. Only caveat is he doesn't always work on gear if it's not up to snuff. As in, if you bring him a Behringer amp, he might just tell you to throw it out and buy something decent. haha.
Also, most non-overbuilt amps will blow fuses if you don't have power tubes installed. B+ skyrockets without the tubes pulling it down. Not sure if that's the case, but if it's already been opened up and looked at, I fear that someone may have realized it has a bad/shorted Output or Power transformer and deemed it not worth the repair. I've seen that often with such amps. Someone starts to fix it, tells owner it will be $400 to repair, they say "no way, give it back" and tech just gives it to them as is, in pieces to limit time costs. Then that person sells it for cheap to recoup some cost, and the new owner is left screwed. I hate seeing that. Certain issues can be a serious PITA to diagnose, that's for sure. Had a Laney AOR with an intermittent OT, took me many attempts to figure out *** was wrong with it. Finally the OT finally gave up the ghost fully, and then it was obvious.
Last, Mace's have a surprising amount of poopie in them. Lots of boards, lots of IC's lots of connectors to disconnect, etc etc. I've worked on a couple, but they are definitely time-sinks if you have to pull the boards. That's why lots of guys don't like taking them. One of the worst are SVT's though.
